Nostalgia Quotes

“Davis was one of the first social scientists to theorize nostalgia. He argued that nostalgia made false use of the past. It is a reconstruction of events that can never offer a perfect facsimile. As a result, nostalgia tells us more about the present, its moods and anxieties, than about past realities.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Like many of those who lived through the Second World War, he had witnessed the horrifying consequences of overly myopic nationalism – a sentiment he partially blamed on nostalgic tendencies among people who had never quite managed to wrest themselves from the fantasies of youth and the family. Fascism, for him, was an unintended consequence of societies that were resistant to change.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Immigrants, refugees and the displaced might have yearned for the homes they had left behind – but those homes had gone. They longed for somewhere, but that somewhere was a place preserved in a particular moment in history.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“There is, of course, a spectrum. And it is much more accurate to speak of many nostalgias, rather than just one. Some experience the emotion fleetingly, rarely, occasionally. Others are intense nostalgics, and the feeling has fundamentally shaped the environments in which they live, the hobbies they pursue and the politics they support. But, regardless, nostalgia is everywhere, if not universal.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“This is also the situation in the National Health Service. Nostalgia is a chronic condition that has reached epidemic proportions in the NHS. Staff are almost universally nostalgic for more plentiful and better-trained colleagues, less bureaucracy and limited managerial control; but also for a more resource-rich working environment and for a different kind of emotional community–one that offered the support, care and comradeship required in a pressurized and sometimes traumatic workplace. Doctors I’ve interviewed almost all reflect on an age of long working hours that was made bearable by the emotional support provided by their colleagues and the compassionate connections they could form with their patients when they were able to maintain some form of continuity of care. These healthcare workers were nostalgic for a sense of professional camaraderie–what one surgeon called the ‘strong feeling of belonging and commitment’ that characterized his younger days in the NHS.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Researchers noticed that nostalgia is a by-product–and often a benign one–of places of work where employees have spent many years, especially where the employer is central to the community, such as a coal mine or a university. The sociologist Yiannis Gabriel was the one of the first to coin the term ‘organizational nostalgia.’ 28”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“This is sometimes referred to as ‘maladaptive nostalgia’, which involves the repetitive reconstructions of bittersweet memories, rather than the creative reconstruction of past experiences. 27 These involuntary memories prevented people from learning new things or adapting to their current circumstances, and made them depressed, anxious and unhappy.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Nostalgia is now regularly used as part of interventions among older adults with dementia. One experiment used something called activity reminiscence therapy (ART) in a care home in Japan. Reminiscence therapy is when people discuss events and experiences from the past to evoke memories, stimulate mental activity and improve a person’s well-being.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Since the early twentieth century, nostalgia has been an emotion about the past. But, paradoxically, it has also been found to have remarkable implications for one’s future. Psychologists argue that it raises optimism, makes people feel inspired and boosts creativity. Far from being a kind of escapism from the present, nostalgia offers people an attainable future.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Nostalgia can be therapeutic, serve as a coping function, and is capable of counteracting the negative effects of loneliness.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“For those who feel emotionally detached and dissatisfied, nostalgia can be used as a tool to create a sense of meaning and purpose. Nostalgia is, therefore, a kind of emotional armour. It can protect us from various psychological and physical threats by making our brains regulate our emotions better and process rewards more effectively and efficiently.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Since the 1980s, more and more psychologists agree about what nostalgia is and how it ought to be defined. However, as the work of people like Lisa Feldman Barrett and James A. Russell indicates, the very identity of emotions–whether they are wholly biological or at least partly cultural–is still up for debate. This is true for fear, and it is also true for nostalgia.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In general, recent neuroscientific research does not reliably prove the hypothesis that an individual emotion can be consistently localized to a specific bit of brain tissue.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In one such study, participants not only reported being flooded with positive, happy feelings after sniffing certain smells, they were also better and more accurately able to remember events from their past. Positive emission tomography (PET) scans of their brains also found that nostalgic smells activated the brain’s reward system and the areas responsible for autobiographical memory (including the hippocampus). A similar series of MRI studies used music rather than smells to evoke nostalgia, but again they found that the emotion activated the reward system and the bits of the brain responsible for autobiographic memory, self-reflection, emotion regulation and positive mood.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“But, perhaps most interestingly, what is different about odour as a sense is that one is not making any attempt to remember something, but rather ‘the remembering is forced upon you.’ 11”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“According to Dr Simon Chu at the University of Liverpool, ‘Odours are incredibly good reminders. Smell recalls memories that are more detailed, more emotional and go back further than those that are recalled by any other sense.’ 10”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“One of the major findings of this era of nostalgia science was that smells were more powerful even than old photographs when it came to triggering memories.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Experiments using MRI scanners have suggested that, when nostalgia is felt, the dopamine deposits itself in the hippocampus, which significantly improves the ability of the person to recall specific memories and events. This helps explain why it is that people are better able to remember things in detail when it is associated with some kind of reward.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In 2022, a team of researchers outlined the consensus. 8 Nostalgia involves four main brain regions. One: the region associated with self-reflection (the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and praecuneus). Two: the region related to autobiographic memory, long-term memory and the recall of factual details from the past (the hippocampus). Three: the region related to the regulation of emotions (the anterior cingulate cortex and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex). And four: the region related to reward processing (the striatum, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). These various regions make up the so-called ‘nostalgic brain’.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Due to this rehabilitation, in scientific circles at least, nostalgia is now seen as a predominantly positive, albeit bittersweet, emotion that arises from personally meaningful, tender and wistful memories of one’s past. But nostalgia is more than just benign; it is now actively therapeutic. The emotion has recently been reconfigured as a powerful and pervasive psychological resource that provides people with a variety of benefits.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In the 1990s, however, scientists–the psychologists–started to rehabilitate nostalgia.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“nostalgic appeals have also been embedded in the twentieth-century revolutions and state politics of socialism. If ‘politics of nostalgia’ are a sign of what Nick Cohen calls ‘decay’, then the decline has been going on for quite some time.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“Left-wing movements and wider society alike have tended to identify nostalgia with conservatism. After all, if the Left is about progress, change and utopian visions of what is to come, then nostalgia ought to have little role to play in its design, politics and rhetoric. Left-wing politics are characterized instead as forward-looking, radical and, by definition, anti-nostalgic, un-nostalgic or even nostophobic.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“as discussed, every new era since at least the nineteenth century has had its own nostalgia wave, or nostalgia panic, and many of those have been political in nature.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“nostalgics–67 per cent–felt the same. Nostalgics were also more likely to be unemployed and to identify as working class. The report concluded that these demographic dynamics suggest that nostalgia is triggered in response to ‘increased anxiety and fear fuelled by processes of rapid personal, economic, or societal change’. 9 In other words, the report concluded with very familiar findings. Nostalgics tended to be older, anti-immigration, and were more likely to want to leave the EU, vote for right-wing political parties and identify as working class.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“throughout the twentieth century, most people thought that nostalgia was a fundamentally small-c conservative emotion, one indulged in by those who would rather avoid engaging with the sometimes messy modern world. It is, as one sociologist phrased it, ‘the latest opiate of the people’. 3”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“People hold retrograde, socially conservative and archaic views all the time, even those who don’t immerse themselves in the past. And if re-enactors, living-history museum attendees and the Chrismans find pleasure and meaning in the past, then why should historians or critics resent or deny them that joy? Nostalgia, for all its flaws, at least has the power to enchant, to lure people into the past and allow them to stay a while, enjoying everything history has to offer.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“the late nineteenth century was a time, like ours, of hectic social and technological transformation. Telegraph cables, steamships, motor cars and eventually aeroplanes knitted the world more and more tightly together, and the pace of change felt unprecedented. It was an era of progress and technological innovation, but also a period of intense introspection and unease. With the new expediency of travel and communication came new diseases–physical, emotional and mental. Passengers were warned about ‘train heart’, a condition that afflicted too-enthusiastic users of the railways, and doctors complained about the emotional toll of being constantly contactable by this new-fangled thing, the telephone.”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“This living history rejects epic narratives in favour of personal observation and local knowledge. It invites us to play games with the past and pretend that we’re at home in it, ignoring the limitations of time and space by reincarnating it in the here and now. Samuel thought that retrochic offered something that dry historical accounts could not. It provided a sensory experience of the past that you could smell, touch and experience; one that was democratic, where no specialist knowledge was necessary, that was populated by amateur enthusiasts and obsessives. This was something to celebrate, ‘not a reason for snark’. 49”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

“In 1994, the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel called this trend ‘retrochic’, a process by which people borrow from the past at random, but he also believed the enthusiasm for heritage was a good thing. 48”
― Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion